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Tuesday, July 31, 2012

I posted a picture of a summery but deserted Tassie beach as my piccie of the day yesterday.

Which drew a question from Anne Gallagher:“Oh wow, what a beautiful beach. If there was a beach like that here in the states it would be filled with people. Where is everyone in Tasmania?”Well to answer your question there are some Tasmanians there down the other end about 6 of them. (if you click the piccie to embiggen it you can just about see them as dots at the far end)

Why only six on such a gorgeous beach?There is a story to that.

Tasmania is the smallest state in Oz. By Aussie standards Tasmania is tiny at 90,768 square kilometres (34,042 square miles). Compared to Western Australia (2,645,615 square km) it is a baby.

But Tassie’s size should not be sneezed at.To put it in perspective it is almost exactly the same size as Maine in the US.It is about a sixth bigger than all of Scotland in the UK.

Scotland which is considered to be sparsely populated by UK standards has 5,254,800 people.Maine by comparison is sparsely populated with 1,328,188

Tasmanians are even scarcer than Mainers. In the whole state there are only 511,718.

Saturday, July 28, 2012

Given I posted about my first car the other day I thought I would post about one of our (two) current cars. It is Italian! A FIAT Ritmo
I have to say I have nearly as much fun driving this as I did driving my old Toyota.
I take that back this pocket rocket is more fun, and it gets 38 miles per gallon (even with petrol-head Al driving)

Thursday, July 26, 2012

In another one of those “Oops I forgot moments” I have realised that the birthday of this little blog has passed me by.

I started this little effort just over three years ago. To be precise my first post was on 8 July 2009.
Here in Oz we put the day of the month before the month so today is 26 July 2012 down here (not July 26 2012).

So as well as happy birthday Al I guess it is happy birthday blog!
Now to my “What, er Who is it Wednesday?”
Well all of you were kind of close-ish or on target!

Jennifer (aka Old Kitty) guessed - “Boy staring at the camera holding the half eaten bit of bread (back, second from left?)”
Linda G agreed - saying “tough one! They're all adorable. Hmm. I think I have to agree with Old Kitty.”

No that isn’t me, BUT it is my half-brother Chris (hippy families were strange things back in the 1960s) .

Nope that isn’t me either BUT it is another one of my half-brothers Murray (what are the odds?)

Lisa guessed - “Far right?”

And Kristen agreed with - “I choose far right too. I can see you in that face. :)”

Well Lisa and Kristen are bang on! The little ‘un on the right is indeed a 3 or 4 year old Al.
I honestly don’t remember the party (or any of the other kids) or whose party it was, but it was the house of one of my Dad’s ex-wives (Chris and Murray’s Mum) so I guess it was Murray, or Chris’. But I would have been around my 4th birthday at the time the piccie was taken so it might have even been mine.

Minette (Chris and Murray’s Mum) was just the sort of person to hold a party for her children’s half-brother. In fact she was kind of a second Mum to me until her death in 2003

I went to Uni that first time in Armidale NSW about 110km
(about 70 miles) from where I grew up.

A friend had rebuilt the car from the parts of three wrecks
and was planning to use it for rally driving. But his plans changed and he
decided to sell.

I needed a car and the price of $500 was something this poor student could just about
scrape together. As it happened I gave Mike $300 and a Gold Sovereign coin I
had in my coin collection.

Me (about 20) and Ian (about 18)

Well that car did me sterling service. Being a young and
silly person I drove it everywhere - Sydney 475km (296 miles) in six hours.
Brisbane 464 Km (290 miles) in four and a half hours through the mountains along the New England Highway (I said I was
young and silly). Armidale is on the Northern Tablelands of NSW, at about 1,000metres
(3,280 feet) above sea level. Because of the cooler mountain climate the first European
settlers dubbed the area New England. I found the highway
was almost deserted late on Saturday nights and so the best time to travel.

My Toyota was the car I had when I married Deb.

I'm the Baby on the left, Deb is my child bride. The groom's men are my elder brother Michael and Ian. The bride's maids, page and flower girl are Deb's siblings

We took it
on our honeymoon, we were so strapped for cash that we camped on the NSW north coast for our honeymoon.

About a year after we were married, we bought a newer car (a
1978 Holden). My younger brother Ian and I resprayed the Toyota so he could use the
car now he was at Uni.

Ian drove the car for another couple of years. Then he bought
a newer car (a 1980 Nissan ute).

It then passed to my Mum because her car had broken down.
Mum drove it for another three or four years between Armidale where she was
working part time and the farm where she lives with her husband Stan (next door
to the farm I grew up).

The car’s useful days came to an end when mum fell asleep at
the wheel.

But maybe the car was looking after her, Mum woke up in time
to avert a total disaster but the car was damaged to the point it was no longer
worth repairing.

A frequent Oz bush tradition is to have a car graveyard on a
farm and Stan’s place is no different (you just never know when a part might
come in handy).

I half imagine that when I go back to visit, the car that
was a part of years of our lives is kind of keeping an eye on us.

Friday, July 20, 2012

Well when I posted this piccie for WIIW I knew it would be a suitably tricky challenge. The colour is a misdirect and the objects are moving too fast to really be captured by the camera.

But I have to say when I posted the second part as a clue I really thought the shape of these objects would give it away.But no it was still a mystery!

Linda I have to say yes the colour is very like Mars, but this piccie was taken out my back door.

Alas Anne, while “Christmas in July” is a growing tradition in Oz it isn’t Chrissy lights.Kitty rivets? I can see that, but no sorry.Marcy sorry you won’t take our winter weather off us.Well Misha, I have to give you a good 60% you are in the right area. It is light taken through falling drops of water. The Camera is pretty still, but the drops are accelerating the further they fall. Here it is I took this back around January. We had a wild summer storm with rain so heavy it was overflowing our gutters.

Then as the sun set it dipped beneath the murk and lit the clouds up with this eerie orange light

Monday, July 16, 2012

She says she has improved again today, and will
go in to town to see her doctor tomorrow.

To say I am relieved is an understatement!

Changing subject I have managed to get to the
end of another draft of my WIP.

As I said a while ago I have split my MS into
two books which has meant developing some of my character’s stories more.

In celebration of another milestone here is
another section from Petenka’s viewpoint. This is set a year after the scene I shared
last time after my characters have been at war for almost a year.

Resignation: Russia - May 1942

Petenka Bykova

‘I hate to say it, but I don’t see how we can survive until the end.’

My words dropped into the well of light around a single precious candle
that flickered on rough timber walls. The dugout was one we shared with Lena
Kominskaya our regimental surgeon. Maybe five years older than us she had been
a surgeon at the Moscow orthopaedic hospital before the war.

Svetlana froze, her spoon halfway between her mess-tin and her mouth.
Incredulously she asked, ‘Have you really taken that long to think about it?’

‘No, of course not. We did get interrupted earlier.’

‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything.’ A click on the rim of the
tin as she put down the spoon, ‘It’s an uncomfortable subject to discuss.’

I peered at her through the flickering light. Even with all we had faced
she looked as relaxed and as sure of herself as the day we met. I shifted
uncomfortably.

Svetlana smiled gently, a knowing smile.

I threw a crust of bread at her, ‘I know, you’re a Communist, you think
I’m deluding myself. We don’t need to have that argument again.’

Retrieving the scrap of bread from her shoulder, she flicked it at my
head. ‘It doesn’t serve any purpose does it?’

‘Children,’ interjected Lena from the shadow of her bunk, ‘play nicely!’

As Lena went back to the letter she was writing, I felt for the crust
and tugged it from where it had caught in my hair. I thought about throwing it
again but dropped it on the floor, someone had to feed the poor rats. ‘That
argument is tired.’

Sveta frowned, serious again, ‘I asked the question, because I realised
how much I was afraid. I thought you must be too.’

‘You’ve been afraid?’

‘How could I not be?’

‘You always seem so calm.’

She looked at me impassively, ‘That’s not how I feel.’

‘How do you feel?’

‘I am terrified of dying. More afraid of being wounded. But…’

‘But?’

‘I am frightened of losing you. Frightened of how I would be if
something happened to my Petenka.’

‘Nothing will happen to me.’

‘You don’t really believe that.’

‘I’, suddenly unsure I paused to consider ‘no, I don’t see how we can
survive. Yet, somehow I can’t really imagine…’

Sunday, July 15, 2012

On Tuesday night my eldest brother Mike phoned me. He had heard from my Mother’s husband that Mum had been taken into hospital that day.

Despite being elderly Mum and her husband live on a farm in the sticks about 40 minutes from the nearest (small) town Dorrigo. Mum had woken to excruciating abdominal pain and after phoning their doctor called an ambulance. She was taken to Dorrigo hospital which has a small emergency department. I was told she would be transferred to the nearest base hospital in Coffs Harbour about 100km away on Wednesday morning.

Mike lives about 5 hours’ drive from Mum while I am about 15 hours’ away.

So I got on the first flight I could to Coffs the next day. From here in Melbourne it is an hour flight to Sydney, where I had to wait for another plane for the hour long flight to Coffs.

Fortunately, Mum responded to treatment and we were able to take her home on Friday. I got home late last night. She is well on the way to recovery.

Needing to relax after a harrowing week I went waterfall hunting this afternoon. The result: piccies of the Olinda Falls on the flanks of Mount Dandenong just outside Melbourne.

Monday, July 9, 2012

Sunday, July 8, 2012

My piccie of the day is of Happy Wanderer (Hardenbergia violacea) flowers. A very common Oz native.

According to Wikipedia it is used as a landscape plant in the southwestern U.S. where it is commonly called lilac vine, and occasionally Mexican lilac vine.

It does originate "south of the border" but an awful lot further than Mexico!

I detected a slight air of disbelief when I posted about Emu sausages, well to silence the sceptics we do indeed farm Emus in Oz. When you think about it Turkeys are native to America and farmed, chickens native to South-Asia and farmed. We just do things bigger down this way!